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A woman looks out over the crowds as passengers wait to board their trains as they head to their hometowns for the Lunar New Year holiday, at Shanghai Hongqiao railway station in Shanghai on February 3, 2016. Over 2.9 billion trips will be made around China during the 40-day 'Spring Festival' travel rush, which kicked off on January 24, Chinese authorities estimated. (Photo by JOHANNES EISELE/AFP/Getty Images)

China's Lunar New Year is done. A record breaking 2.91 billion trips were made by trains, planes and automobiles, up 3.6% from last year, according to the National Development and Reform Commission. Six million of them went overseas. Those who stuck closer to home are estimated to have spent some $100 billion shopping and eating out. That number is up, too. This is private China, not state-owned China. It might be the only part of China worth looking at.

Stephen Roach, former chief Asia economist for Morgan Stanley and now a senior fellow at Yale University's Jackson Institute of Global Affairs said on Feb. 10 that the doomsday talk about the Chinese economy was misplaced.

"I think the Chinese economy is performing much, much better than your average market participant would want to conclude right now," Roach said during a China-themed event at the Brookings Institution in DC last week. Roach cited urban job growth. Check this out: an average of 11 million new jobs were created per year over the last three years in China. The government's target was around 10 million. Roach said the the job growth was happening in labor-intensive services. Services in China generated about 30% of all new jobs last year.

"I think the transformative process in China, where mix of GDP is far more important than the overall GDP, is really the key to the puzzle," Roach said. He said that the transformation is intact and that the economy is not on the brink of a "hard landing."

Then what do you call last June? Well, part of that correction was long overdue of course. Domestic investors had piled into the mainland equity markets on hopes that the MSCI would include the A-shares in its massive MSCI Emerging Markets Index. If they had, it would have created overnight demand for Chinese shares from the big exchange traded funds that track that benchmark. Locals were also betting up new tech stocks, thinking the government was going to lend them a hand. That all came crashing down around June 10 when MSCI said no to the A-shares. A similar correction occurred two months later when China's monetary authorities surprised everyone by increasing the trading band of the renmimbi, allowing for a 4% move in either direction per day rather than a 2% move. Word on the street was that China was deliberately weakening its currency. The economy must be really weak. And they didn't tell us. China is scared. That was the story line. Investors old. The real reason for the devaluation was the authorities were giving the market a greater say in the renmimbi's direction, as was required by the International Monetary Fund if the Chinese wanted its currency to become part of its Special Drawing Rights currency basket. China is now part of that currency basket. It did what it had to do to get there.

Consensus views on China are still based on a hard landing, which includes bank defaults, increased unemployment and a large scale devaluation of the yuan. Large scale would mean at least 7 renmimbi to the dollar. It's now around 6.15.